A brand new venue with a proud old heritage

“Hello, Reginald, you alright?”

Back for his weekly Wednesday lunch, a regular customer was greeted warmly by Holly Eggleton as he walked in with his wife.

The Pony & Trap may be no more but this building – now renamed as the Pony Chew Valley – is still open as a restaurant and still attracting diners for the umpteenth time as well as the first time.

Events can now take place here from weddings to corporate shindigs, and there is also a cookery school upstairs.

But Reginald had just walked into what at heart is still a pub and a restaurant which held a Michelin star for a decade before Holly and her brother Josh decided to rip almost everything apart.

That was done in order to make a fresh start, but one which is the culmination of years of hard graft and learnings from the siblings and their close-knit team.

Josh Eggleton thinking of his next business idea in the Pony garden

“We’ve always run restaurants, that’s our nucleus, that’s our core,” said Josh, sat with Holly close to the entrance to the pub nestled on a quiet country lane close to Chew Valley Lake.

“We need to keep that going to activate all of the other things.”

Those “other things” are a multitude of ideas from Josh who is seemingly unable to ever rest on his laurels, always looking for the next project whether that is sitting on the board of Bristol Beer Factory or acting as a consultant for Boxhall on Welsh Back (progress on which is currently stalled due to the builders going bust).

So why knock down a Michelin starred restaurant? “Sometimes to make things better, you have to take them apart and rebuild them,” Josh said.

“Essentially I think that’s what it is. Yes, we were a one-Michelin star pub. We were at the forefront of that Michelin star pub movement. We were consistently in the top-five best restaurant-pubs in the country. Will we get back to that?

“It would be lovely to get back to that. But it was never an aspiration. When we won our Michelin star for the first time in 2011, I was more shocked than anyone. I didn’t actually think it was possible. I almost fainted.

Food at the Pony is best washed down by a pint from Bristol Beer Factory

“But it was a double-edged sword. It propelled us forward. It made us busier. It meant we could make more things, learn more about our cuisine and teach ourselves about what good hospitality is, what good food is and where good food comes from.

“That’s what the idea of the Pony is now. We’re extending the bookends of the lens that we work in. Our old lens was a restaurant, country pub, gastropub – whatever you want to call it – serving food, and open six or seven days a week.

“Now, we still do that but we do it with education in mind. We are educating everyone around us. We are educating our staff, our community and people who are interested.”

The Pony is doing that by growing food on site so people can come and learn how to grow, from community groups to a no-dig class in the garden, teaching people how to cook and how to eat well, from cookalongs via Zoom to cookery classes, school and college groups.

“We just want people to enjoy the environment that we have created,” continued Josh as he led me on a tour of the Pony’s garden, in which many of the ingredients on the plates now come from.

It’s not just plates at the Pony either. If not used here, the veg will be sent to Root in Wapping Wharf and in Wells, with chefs from the Pony’s sister restaurants coming to work this land alongside Tim the gardener in order to appreciate it more.

Within one of the polytunnels, Tim was hard at work as diners just a few hundred yards away enjoyed the fruits of his labour.

Tim the gardener in one of the Pony’s polytunnels

“This is an absolutely enormous springboard” Tim said, describing the opportunity that he and the team have here. “The land gives you an idea of what it’s able to provide.”

The garden nearest the large extension to the pub – over which a stretch tent protects diners from the elements – has been extensively landscaped. Walk from your table outside and find an abundance of herbs.

Perennial herbs including lavender, rosemary, sage and thyme. Soft herbs in the polytunnels: parsley, two types of fennel, dill. As well as kales, as many vegetables as possible and an orchard.

“We used to do a little bit of that here before. We just weren’t very good at shouting about it!,” Josh admitted, pointing out more areas of the garden where more things will be happening soon.

Guests can wander through the newly landscaped garden

Things might not have been happening here at all, with Josh and Holly having serious conversations at the height of the pandemic about closing this part of their business.

Instead, they opened the Pony on North Street as a stopgap while the original Pony was taken apart in order to start over again. “It was really touch and go,” Josh said.

“There were a lot of times when I thought we wouldn’t get back open. A lot of times when I thought about whether I even wanted to. That was the truth.”

Holly added: “My words were: ‘We can’t let it go without trying again.’ But after 24 months, the curtains had been closed on the Pony & Trap. We had changed and it was also time to change the offering here.

“We had always had aspirations to do other things but maybe we never had the guts to do it. This time round, we had the opportunity so we gave it a go.”

If you come for a bimonthly Sunday lunch at the Pony now, you will find Josh stationed at the carvery, having conversations about where the meat on people’s plate has come from, giving guests no fat or extra fat if they want it, interacting with each person as they come to collect their food.

Prep starts every other Tuesday for each Sunday lunch now; and Josh is proud to say that since the Pony reopened, he has served every single Sunday lunch customer.

The Pony Chew Valley is a new venue but with the heritage of its acclaimed predecessor.

“We have taken everything that we have learned over the years, all the feedback and we have distilled it into this,” Josh explained.

“We love to deliver local, sustainable, tasty food. We do a lot of community work. We come up with different ideas for different restaurants and different concepts.

“Because I can’t help myself. If you ask me why, I ask myself that all the time. I don’t know why. I really don’t. It’s not to make money. It’s the need for creativity. The need to nurture the people around us, some of who have worked with us for more than ten years.

“If we grow, we grow with them. We grow together. And that is so important.”

Bristol24/7’s summer 2023 magazine is being distributed to pick up free across our city

This is an unedited version of the article that originally appeared in Bristol24/7’s quarterly magazine

All photos: Martin Booth      

Read next:

• An evening of cooking at the newly expanded Pony
• Dishes revealed for tasting menu at EatDrink24/7
• Bristol24/7 to take over Better Food for a series of panel discussions

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